


Time Passes

by samariumwriting



Category: Xenoblade Chronicles
Genre: (sort of), Introspection, Other characters mentioned - Freeform, Past Character Death, Physical Disability
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 18:41:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18371852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: It's been months since the Battle of Sword Valley, and Dunban reflects on what's changed in that time.





	Time Passes

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 7th birthday, US Xenoblade Chronicles! I'm not from the US but I thought now was as good a time as any to write something. Just because I felt like it.

It was funny, Dunban thought, how time passes. He’d been stuck in bed for months now. It felt like it had been forever, but also no time at all.

He supposed it was to do with how the first couple of months had been spent. Drifting in and out of consciousness, constantly in pain, barely able to move to open his eyes without crying out. Muscles seizing without warning, spasming with the remnants of a sharp pain no longer coursing through his body. Those months had felt unending, but once he’d come out the other side, he could barely remember an individual moment. It was like no time had passed at all.

Yet something else was changing. The world was healing around him, slowly but surely. Children who had lost family members lost their baby teeth, lost a precious toy, and things weren’t always significant anymore. Fresh-faced recruits he’d spent months training for combat became proper members of the defence force.

But with everything that changed in the Colony, so many things stayed the same. Fiora still invited Shulk and Reyn around and they’d be noisy late into the night until they realised they were probably disturbing him and apologised before the noise slowly built all over again. Reyn still complained about all the training he had to do, Shulk still puzzled over the same questions, forgetting to eat or go outside.

Basically, time was strange. The way timed passed was odd, and the things he’d expected to never change had changed. He’d been part of a group of three. Eclectic soldiers, but an effective group. A solid team. Nothing could break the three of them apart.

No one had told him whether Mumkhar had lived or died; he hadn’t asked. In some ways, he didn’t really want to know. There was part of him that hoped that the man just didn’t want to see him like this, unable to move. Not really the person he used to be. But he knew that it wasn’t the case. He’d seen Mumkhar’s twitching in the battle. If his old friend was alive, he certainly wasn’t in Colony 9 anymore.

And, well, he supposed that he was the other missing member of their group of three, though Dickson wasn’t as present as he used to be either. He’d dropped in a few times, and Shulk said that he saw him relatively frequently, but he was off travelling the Bionis. He supposed that was something that came with time, too; Dickson had always been headed for greater things than just this small place. Honestly, Dunban wondered why he’d stayed for so long. Shulk had been semi-independent for as long as he’d been here.

He also found that he had a lot of time on his hands now. Fiora would come in and talk to him several times a day, more so in the beginning than now, and Shulk usually came at least every other day, providing someone hadn’t forced him into bed after pushing himself too hard. But both of them had lives, things to attend to, and they couldn’t spend all their time with him just entertaining him.

Dunban had never been much of a reader. As a child, he’d always preferred to go and play outside, and by the time he’d started to grow properly he was training for the defence force. School had never been his thing, and he hadn’t exactly had the money or time for books when he was attempting to raise Fiora. There were far more important things than reading.

But now...well, he had a lot of spare time, and Fiora had always been a lot more bookish. She’d borrowed all kinds of things from people who had more books (Shulk), who in turn had been reading because Dickson encouraged it over all the training that Reyn threw himself into. So he ended up reading, of all things. If he’d told himself a year ago that he’d spent months in bed reading books soon enough, he would have laughed.

He supposed that was just another way that time changed things. He got older, people around him got older, people changed, people grew. Callers to his house stopped coming so much when they realised their support wasn’t going to lead to a miraculous recovery. Fiora had to get a second job once the emergency injury pay from the defence force turned into the tiny trickle of disability assistance when the feeling in his fingers refused to come back.

Sometimes, he felt like the changes were all bad. He was less mobile, less able to do things. His name was that of a fallen hero rather than a current one, and it wasn’t like he was old. He should have gone on to be a captain in the defence force, and been able to support Fiora when she and Shulk eventually realised that actually, the attraction was mutual. And there were all those things that he now couldn’t do, and may never do. 

But he knew he wasn’t giving up. With every day, the pain receded a little. It became easier to move, easier to do things with the arm that wasn’t ruined. He could breathe a little easier when thinking about the future, knowing that he was recovering, even if it was only gradual. He hoped that the damage was limited to his arm, that he’d be able to move mostly like he used to.

And he supposed there were a handful of things that were okay about being stuck in bed like this. He’d been able to read and learn in a way he’d never had time for before, and he had a hell of a lot of time to think. To think about what he’d achieved, which really wasn’t insignificant, considering how the battle had turned out and how life was now in the colony. He felt like he understood the world a lot better, and himself.

Time passing wasn’t good, perhaps. It didn’t exactly bring on any good feelings in himself, and most days he worried about how his life would turn out when he’d recovered a bit more. But it brought changes that weren’t clearly good or bad, and discovering what they’d turn out to be was an adventure Dunban would gladly embark on.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment here or on my twitter (@samariumwriting). I also take writing requests, so if you have anything you'd like to see then please don't hesitate to let me know!


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